189 Quotes by Cynthia Ozick

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.

The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.

Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way.

Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.

Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!